Once a spy

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Brooklyn was booming. Elsewhere. Drummond Clark’s block was still packed with boxy, soot-grayed houses, some settled at odd angles and all so close together they looked like one long soot-grayed building. At holiday time, the patchy displays of festive lights accentuated the cracks as much as anything.

On this bitter Christmas Eve, Drummond stood hunched in his small kitchen, alternately green and red in the reflection of a neighbor’s tree, struggling to open a can of soup for dinner. He wondered how all the years had come to this. No friends, no family. He couldn’t remember the last time one of the neighbors had invited him in.

Granted, a longtime widower wasn’t much of a fit in an increasingly young and family-oriented neighborhood. Also the world was increasingly elitist and materialistic, and his station lacked luster: He’d worked in sales at a middling appliance manufacturer for thirty years. And, he acknowledged, he lacked luster-in sixty-four years, one gets the message. But none of that quite accounted for tonight.

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